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Five Custom Gadgets You Can't Buy
photojournaliste noted a little story running over on Forbes which kinda looks like their editors read Slashdot. Their Five Gadgets You Can't Buy include a few things you might have seen here, as well as some new custom hardware hacks. If you didn't get it for christmas, maybe one of these will inspire you to build it yourself.
I apologize to everyone reading my comments above. Really, I did graduate High Skool.
WTF? Over?
...a Phantom console? :-)
Directions to build the thing: http://mini-itx.com/projects/falcon-itx/
This is seriously one of the dumbest lists I ever seen. The first one you can actually buy, Belkin makes it. The second is a drink cooler, which you can get a device that does that same thing for 8 bucks. The third one (lego person inside of a mouse) is at least original.
The controlled etcha-a-sketch is actually cool.
And then followed by a mini-itx pc someone shoved into the body of an old Millennium Falcon toy.
So over all we've got 1 cool one, 2 ugly ones, 1 creative but useless one, and one that just shouldn't be in the list because you can buy a good version of it.
Mod point free since 2001
I thought there was already an iPod external battery pack for sale by someone. A google search shows one for sale by Bilk'n, er, Belkin.
The article seemed short, I only counted three gadgets, with it being page 1 of 1.
The falcon was on "the screen savers", & Yoshi built a cooler glass using computer parts. Of coarse G4 changed the focus of the show and it's not even interesting any more.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
1: Jupiter
2: My toe-nail clippings
3: Profit!
4: A profound sense of well being.
My (not very good point) is that just because you cant buy them, doesnt necessarily mean youd WANT to buy them.
Good idea to have an article on custom gadgets. PC mods can be found everywhere, however. ./ has its hands on it.
Batteries for those small devices should be more of a concern these days as they *do* eat through them like mad. When it comes down to it, all you need are some cells and some resistors to regulate the power, but it'd be nice if someone started a little how-to section for each individual device.
The cryogenic mouse is neat.. not extremely practical I'm afraid. I'm sure someone will start making them commercially now that
With these sorts of articles, I like to see extreme stuff. Anti-gravitational engines, that sort of thing.
You probably could buy any of these. Like with everything, it's only a matter of price.
I couldn't fail to disagree with you less.
Looks like something MacGyver would come up with. Just try to get it through a TSA screener!
...Most of these gadgets are really quite useless.I would'nt pay anything exhorbitant to get any of these.There are quite a few mods/hacks in the slashdot archives which are a gazillion times better than these.
Lord of the Binges.
Of course, if I actually ever attempted to build something like that I would probably blow the whole house up. Hence, I'll stick with my regular old-school fridge.
I am not anti-advertising. Just interested in the compromises that are made to sell product.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
It is like playing "where's wally" except your looking for the TFA hidden in the ads.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Instead of a new Mac, I picked up a copy of Phatware's PenOffice, to make my Fujitsu Stylistic even more useful (PenOffice works w/ a wider variety of apps than Windows Pen Services, doesn't lock up like CIC PenX does on my machine after ~15 minutes use, and has a nifty annotation feature for Word .docs) --- unfortunately the only pen computing solutions Apple offers are Macs w/ Wacom graphic tablets (I mislike working on one surface and watching what happens on another, and gave up on schlepping a graphics tablet and a laptop around when I got my NCR-3125) or a PowerMac w/ a Wacom Cintiq --- that last is a pretty cool (albeit expensive) solution, but it's uncommon enough not much software specifically takes advantage of it (Alias' Sketchbook was ported to Mac OS X after many requests). Contrast this w/ the situation for Windows Tablet PCs and look at http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html &c.
.pdf version (why aren't .pdfs as document previews in bundles a standard for apps these days?) and allowed one to do basic annotation and mark up it'd still be fabulously useful (can you say ebooks? importing annotations from Acrobat and applying them as revisions in Word?)
Think of it as an extension to the iPod line --- the iPod lets one carry all of one's music (as a backup too) and modify the order it plays in --- the iPod Photo adds all of one's images to that --- how about a further upscale unit to allow one to carry all of one's documents?
Even if it did nothing but display a
Being able to run Mac applications in situations where a laptop is inappropriate / inconvenient (meetings, interviews, while walking about), and having the (portable!) equivalent to a Wacom Cintiq (look at the program Maxivista for an example of how this could work) is just icing on the cake.
And of course, it'd be nice to replace my Newton which I still use for contact management, note-taking and reading some ebooks.
William
(whose Stylistic has music, hundreds of ebooks, a complete graphic design portfolio _and_ all the tools necessary to update and work on said portfolio --- see http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio.html --- including a copy of TeX, LyX &c.)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Well, it was a pretty shitty article, so maybe Forbes is taking cues from Slashdot's journalistic style?
I meta-mod all positive moderation Unfair, because it's abuse of the system.